Work in Progress - a linocut for "Our Rarer Monsters"

I'm currently working on the seventh linocut of a series of eight that will be published in a book of poetry by Noel Sloboda later this year. The book will be "Our Rarer Monsters", and I've been posting the linocuts and some various related images over on flickr. Here's the first little doodle, drawn on the manuscript while reading the poems and thinking about the kinds of images I wanted to make: Then there were some thumbnail sketches in the sketchbook - here's an excerpt from that particular exploration with the pen: And here's the initial drawing that I worked up on the block, before I made the first cut: As I've been working on these prints I've been scanning the blocks. I've found this to be useful as a way of deciding where to go next with the gouge. I can take the scan in photoshop, heighten the contrast to get a sense of the final black and white look of the linocut, and reverse the image to see the mirror image composition that will be the actual finished print. That reversal can have big effects on a composition, so it's helpful to have some sense of what's going to happen. But I realized that the scans themselves were becoming kind of beautiful as images on their own, both for the contrast between the carved mark and the drawn mark, and because the surface gets so heavily worked as I draw and erase and redraw, looking for both the correct value and, often more critically, the direction of the cut that I want to make next. I tend to work very slowly and sneak up on the image, and try to avoid settling in to a pattern when I cut. I really want to draw with the gouge. So, I post these hybrid images as a sort of "behind-the-scenes" look at how the linocuts happen. It's a different species of drawing than what I do in my sketchbook. Some of the marks are describing value, and some are shorthand marks recording decisions about which direction my next cut should take - which of the possible cross-contours my gouge will follow. The last image above is the current state of the block - plenty of opportunities left to screw it up. Stay tuned to see if it survives.

Lynda Barry thinks about why adults don't draw.

"One idea I have is, the big change that happens in drawing is when a kid is drawing, the paper is a place for an experience. At some point, the paper transforms into a thing that is good or bad, rather than a place where the paper itself isn't -- you've seen kids draw and they don't give a shit [afterward], they just leave [the drawing] on the table. An adult spends the same amount of time [drawing] and they don't know what to do with it. What's it for? They get freaked out about what this thing might be for because there's this idea that it's for something. They don't do that when they take a walk or a bike ride. They don't take a bike ride and then go, "Man, what do I do with this now? I don't know if that was really good. I felt like this was a good bike ride," but then they saw this video and, "No, it wasn't a good bike ride." [Laughs]"

Lynda Barry, thinking about why adults stop drawing.

from an interview with Chris Mautner

Art Lesson

I'm sitting on the couch, drawing with my daughter Rachel. I'm drawing the couch we're sitting on, and the bookshelves next to it - just a little perspective drawing. She's watching, and guessing what I'm going to draw next. I draw one of her drawings in a large frame hanging above the couch. She turns around and looks at the bare wall and says "Where is it?!".

Why Draw? Richard Serra.

You might also like to know what William Kentridge, Jim Dine, and Mauricio Lasansky have had to say about drawing.

Text Pieces

Why Draw? William Kentridge.

drawing from Felix in Exile, William Kentridge
charcoal, pastel, and gouache, 120 x 160 cm


Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev - You've often said that everything you do is drawing, and that you see drawing as a model for knowledge.

William Kentridge - What does it mean to say that something is a drawing - as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you're going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way.




Christov-Bakargiev - So although you said at the beginning of this interview that for you drawing can become a self-centred process, drawing does not justify itself per se.

Kentridge - No, but I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing, the contingent way that images arrive in the work, lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are or how we operate in the world. It is in the strangeness of the activity itself that can be detected judgement, ethics and morality. Trains of thought that seem to be going somewhere but can't quite be brought to a conclusion. If there were to be a very clear, ethical or moral summing-up in my work, it would have a false authority.

from an interview in William Kentridge published by Phaidon

Why Draw? Jim Dine.

Athena's Night, Jim Dine, 1995
charcoal and isolated areas of pastel, 79 1/8" x 41"


Drawing is not an exercise.

"I don't make sketches. I don't make studies. A drawing is a drawing, a painting is a painting. There are certain subjects I don't paint. I don't paint portraits. I don't believe I have ever painted a self-portrait, but I've drawn myself a lot with great elaborateness. There is a lot of rubbing out, a lot of bringing back, and certainly working on it for many months. A drawing is a labor for me, not in a bad way, but in an intense way. I am able to search through drawing, for the age and personality. I look at the way flesh falls. I want to get it right, but right doesn't mean just anatomically correct, it means to get it right so it's convincing to me as an invention of the face. I have a total connection between my hand and my eye - it's just that I can't see sometimes. Sometimes I can see perfectly - by seeing I mean it's like an inner eye. It's not just two eyes seeing, it's the memory of how things look or the memory of how I want them to look. I'm very ambitious for my drawing. When I'm taking out and putting back, I'm not building necessarily - I'm taking out, hoping the next pass across the page will be a touchdown. I am not erasing because I couldn't get the object accurately, but because I am hoping for grace to come to me. I don't think hard work makes a good drawing. I have had a lot of students who worked very hard and after two weeks of drawing would turn out a drawing that was completely dead, even though it showed rigorous looking. It's not what I want. If I erase, it's because I didn't get what I wanted the first time, and if I don't get it by the twentieth time let's say, and the paper is halfway gone, then I start to patch the paper. Drawing is not an exercise. Exercise is sitting on a stationary bicycle and going nowhere. Drawing is being on a bicycle and taking a journey. For me to succeed in drawing, I must go fast and arrive somewhere. The quest is to keep the thing alive - the drawing and the state of grace. I get the endorphin high by the intensity of my looking and it is then that I leave my body."

"I need a lot of time to make a drawing. I always needed time for my incubation process, but now I need more time because I want so much more from the work and from my romantic unconscious. Drawing is the medium which has been the blood of my life. It allows me and others who are open to human emotion to experience a straightforward view without artifice, but with poetry."

excerpts from Jim Dine's essay "Putting Down Marks (my life as a draftsman)"

Why Draw? Mauricio Lasansky.

from the Nazi Drawings, drawing #2, Mauricio Lasansky, 1966
pencil, water and turpentine based washes on paper. 23" x 23.5"


"I tried to keep not only the vision of The Nazi Drawings simple and direct but also the materials I used in making them. I wanted them to be done with a tool used by everyone everywhere. From the cradle to the grave, meaning the pencil. I felt if I could use a tool like that, this would keep me away from the virtuosity that a more sophisticated medium would demand." --Mauricio Lasansky.

If you're unfamiliar with this amazing series of drawings, you should definitely spend some time here.

One of my best experiences as a grad student was installing an exhibition of the Nazi Drawings in the I.U. gallery - I was paying my tuition by being the gallery assistant that year. In this capacity I also got to chauffeur Mr. Lasansky around campus when he came to lecture and critique. As he was leaving he gave me a signed copy of the original exhibition catalog for the Nazi Drawings, from 1966. It's one of my little treasures.